Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Zipper Accidents (10 page)

The Cowboys aren’t the only NFL team without the rights to their own name online. The Chicago Bears, for example, can’t get
bears.com
, because that’s a place to buy teddy bear T-shirts.

BOXING DAY

In August 2012, Hu Seng of Chongqing, China, had a friend tape him shut inside a cardboard box, and then call a delivery service to be shipped to his girlfriend as a romantic surprise. The delivery was supposed to take 30 minutes, but the company went to the wrong address—and it took three hours to get to the girlfriend. When the girlfriend opened the box, she found her unconscious boyfriend inside. Seng and his friend had not thought to put any airholes in the box. (Surprise!) He was briefly hospitalized but made a full recovery.

I
n 1986 shipping company U.S. Lines was having trouble paying its debts. Especially worrisome was the $93 million it owed to Prudential Insurance. Held as collateral on the loan: U.S. Lines’ fleet of cargo ships, which included some of the largest ships on earth. Prudential agreed to restructure the loan, but it wasn’t until after U.S. Lines went bankrupt that anyone noticed a problem with the paperwork. The loan should have been $92,885,000, but someone had written it as only $92,885. Prudential lost over $90 million, including $11 million they had to give to U.S. Lines after selling off five of the cargo ships.

•
  
In 2010 JP Morgan Chase offered currency trader Kai Herbert a job in South Africa. The job paid 2.4 million rand (about $320,000) per year, but things got even better for Herbert when someone flubbed his contract and wrote his salary as 24 million rand. Herbert signed the contract and hoped no one would notice. Chase caught the mistake before his first day. Herbert sued them for $1 million, a number that included compensation for “lost earnings.” The judge disagreed, saying that Herbert’s claim was “a gross exaggeration,” and in the end, Herbert got nothing.

B
lowin’ in the wind.
A Nebraska woman was killed by Taco Bell. Not the food, but the sign. She parked her pickup truck in the restaurant’s lot after arranging to meet someone who was going to buy her two dogs (which were in the back seat of the pickup). She said she’d be parked “under the Taco Bell sign.” While she was waiting for the buyer, a strong gust of wind blew the sign over; it landed directly on the cab of the pickup, killing the woman. Her dogs were unharmed.

On a roll.
In 1991 Edward Juchniewicz, 76, had a doctor’s appointment in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. An ambulance brought him from his nursing home to the appointment. But the paramedics left him in the parking lot on a gurney while they went inside to make sure the doc was ready. The unattended gurney started rolling away. It hit a curb, flipped over, and sent Juchniewicz onto the pavement. He died from severe head injuries.

Breathless.
The problem with getting naked, putting a condom over your head, and then suffocating to death in bed is that when your body is found, the newspapers will all say you were found naked in bed with a condom over your head. That bizarre end came to Gary Ashbrook, who was also found with three empty nitrous oxide cartridges.

That sucks.
On April 28, 1988, Clarabelle “C.B.” Lansing was dutifully performing her routine as a flight attendant on Aloha Airlines Flight 243 when a small portion of the plane’s bulkhead came off. One second, Lansing was standing in the aisle collecting empty drink cups; the next second, she got sucked out through the hole. Dozens more people were hurt, but the pilots were able to safely land the compromised aircraft. The only fatality was Lansing.

Just dessert.
In 1995 an exotic dancer from Italy named Gina Lalapola was hired to jump out of a cake at a stag party. After climbing inside, the cake was sealed. But then it took an hour to get to the cake-jumping-out portion of the party. When Lalapola’s cue arrived, she did not. The men waited. Still no stripper. So they opened up the cake and found her inside. She’d run out of air and died. Party over.

Woodn’t you know?
Famed playwright Sherwood Anderson was eating appetizers and hors d’oeuvres on a cruise ship in 1941. He didn’t take the toothpick out of one of those treats, swallowed it, developed peritonitis from it, and died.

I
n August 2006, legendary Australian cricket player Dean Jones was covering a tournament in Colombo, Sri Lanka, for Australian TV network Ten Sport when he said, “The terrorist has got another wicket.” By “got another wicket,” Jones was saying that someone had gotten a player out. By “terrorist,” Jones was referring to South African player Hashim Amla, the first Muslim ever to play for the South African national team. Jones had thought he had said the remark quietly enough to not be picked up by the mic—but he was wrong. The public outcry was so immediate and so immense that Jones was on a plane out of Sri Lanka—and fired from his job with Ten Sport—within hours. Jones issued a contrite public apology, saying the comment had simply been a stupid attempt at humor.

A year later, Jones received a Father of the Year award from his Australian home state of Victoria. In 2010 that became another source of awkwardness when it was discovered that Jones, a married father of two, had been having an affair with a flight attendant for the previous nine years and had even had a child with her—a child he had never met. The state of Victoria took his Father of the Year Award back.

V
ergatorio
is a derivative of a Spanish slang term for the male genitalia. It’s used throughout Latin America, except in Venezuela, where it means “reliable,” which is why it’s used as the name of a cell phone model issued by a state-run mobile phone company.

........................................................................................................

At one time, “gay” meant the same thing as “happy,” whereas today its most prominent usage is as a synonym for “homosexual.” Nevertheless,
Golden Gaytime
is a popular ice cream brand in Australia. Four-pack boxes promise “four delicious chances to have a gay time!”